And pity makes his gentle
style, pity makes him regardless of artifice, and gives his often
clumsy novels an undercurrent which sweeps them beyond technical
masterpieces whose only merit is sharpness of thought. It is
instructive to compare the relative fortunes of Hardy and
Meredith, once always bracketed--the apostle of pity in comparison
with the most subtle and brilliant mind of his time. Hardy has
outranked him.
Already it begins to appear that the inconsistent, half-conscious
Will that was the sum and substance of Hardy's pessimism was given
certain attributes of gloom that scarcely belonged to it. The
ruthless struggle for life by which the fittest for the
circumstances of the moment, and by no means the best, survive at
the expense of the others is no longer conceived as the clear law
of human life. Science, with the rediscovery of Mendelism and its
insistence upon psychological factors has submitted important
qualifications to this deduction which Hardy, in common with
others intellectually honest of his age, was forced to make. But
it is not Hardy's philosophy, sound or unsound, that counts in his
art? except in so far as it casts the plan of his stories, or
sometimes, as in "Tess," or "The Woodlanders," gives too much play
to cruel accident, and therefore an air of unreality to the tenser
moments of the plots.
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